Police investigated a shooting in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood last month.
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesNew York City police have made fewer arrests amid the coronavirus pandemic, prompting questions from some elected officials and criminologists over whether that has played a role in a rise in shootings and other violent crime.
Officers made 84,930 arrests between Jan. 1 and Aug. 9, a 39% drop from the same period last year, according to the New York Police Department.
Homicides, meanwhile, rose 29% to 244 from Jan. 1 to Aug. 2 from the same period last year. The city also recorded an 84.6% rise in shooting victims to 1,017 during those dates compared with the same period in 2019.
In the past few weeks, the police, the mayor, other politicians and criminologists have debated the significance of falling arrests at a time when crime is rising in New York City as it emerges from a public-health crisis that has devastated its economy.
Joseph Pollini, a former NYPD lieutenant commander and adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that fewer arrests, even for low-level offenses, can lead to more crime.
“If there’s nobody taking hard-core police action on the streets, from the lowest level to the highest level, it creates a big kink in the system,” he said.
NYPD Chief of Crime Strategies Michael LiPetri said the drop in arrests hasn’t affected crime rates. He cited gun arrests, which have fallen a moderate 8% to 1,899 from Jan. 1 through Aug. 9 compared with the same period in 2019.
Mr. LiPetri said New York City police have intentionally made fewer arrests for years, as part of a strategy that focuses on violent crimes while reducing overall arrests for less-serious offenses. The number of arrests made by the NYPD began to decline in 2010, he said, as crime rates fell to some of the lowest levels in decades.
Officers guarded a New York City precinct last month amid a protest on the sixth anniversary of the death of a man who was placed in a chokehold by police.
Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images“We reformed, and obviously it worked,” Mr. LiPetri said in an interview.
Several factors have steepened an overall drop in arrests this year, he said, including lockdown measures to contain the pandemic, which led to less traffic on city streets and a reduction in some criminal activity. At the same time, a large number of officers fell ill with Covid-19 during the height of the surge in April, Mr. LiPetri said.
The drop in arrests was also a result of the large protests that followed the May 25 killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, Mr. LiPetri said, as the NYPD diverted some officers away from their normal patrol duties to oversee the demonstrations.
Weeks after the marches died down, officers were still working to solve crimes committed around the protests, including vandalism of police vehicles and widespread looting in Manhattan, Mr. LiPetri said. He also said a new law that criminalizes an officer’s use of a chokehold has had a chilling effect on enforcement.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, has defended the law. He said that police have begun making more arrests after overcoming many challenges this year, including delays in prosecutions due to the coronavirus.
“I don’t doubt for a moment things are swinging back the other way very quickly,” Mr. de Blasio said at a press conference last week.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain, said he believed officers in some precincts were staging an intentional work slowdown, based on reports of slow response times from residents and his conversations with officers.
He sent a letter to Mr. de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea in July asking for an investigation into the matter. “The city needs a better response to this, to determine if this is just a crime surge, or is it a lack of proper enforcement,” Mr. Adams said.
NYPD officials have denied an intentional slowdown. But law-enforcement unions and some criminologists have said that officers, sensing a general atmosphere of hostility toward police, are less likely to take action.
Write to Ben Chapman at Ben.Chapman@wsj.com
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